My school cafeteria hero for this month so far is a guy named Kenneth Thompson from Houston. The union theater stagehand was among many who read reports of a school in Utah that yanked hot lunches from the hands of dozens of children and — as the stunned kids and peers watched — dumped them into the garbage because of delinquent accounts.

Thompson figured that some poor and low-income kids in the elementary school where he mentors and tutors in his neighborhood were similarly going without a hot lunch. He was right. He learned 60 kids were eating cold cheese or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches instead of a hot meal because their parents had not paid off the accounts.

Now, Thompson did not wag his finger and rail at the delinquent parents or reminisce about back in the day. He also did not go off on school officials. He pulled $465 from his wallet and paid off the outstanding balances. You see, he believes no kid should go without a hot meal, regardless of the reason.

“These are elementary kids,” Thompson told Today.com. “They’re not bankers, and not responsible for the financial issues in the household.”

“They don’t need to be worried about finances,” Thompson told a TV station in Houston. “They need to be worried about what grade they got in spelling.”

Of course, we learned this week that Utah is hardly unique. A report by Mid- Minnesota Legal Aid found that most public school districts in the state deny a child a hot lunch — or in some cases provide no lunch at all — to children who can’t pay for them. Like the school in Utah, some places here have grabbed lunches from students and dumped them.

The report, mostly responses to a survey conducted by the nonprofit legal aid group, found that 46 school districts follow a policy “of an immediate or eventual refusal to serve food to a child who cannot afford the 40-cent copay.”

Three such districts listed in the report hail from the east metro area: Stillwater, West St. Paul-Mendota Heights-Eagan and Inver Grove Heights.

About 166 other districts will allow some hot meals on credit to students who qualify for reduced-price lunches, but not always. They do provide an alternate meal — usually a sandwich and milk — until the account is paid off. St. Paul is the largest district that follows that procedure.

Conversely, 97 districts, including Minneapolis, will always provide a hot lunch to a child in the reduced-price category, even if there is an unpaid account.

“There have been kids turned away with nothing,” said Jessica Webster, staff attorney with the Legal Services Advocacy Project in St. Paul and the report’s chief researcher. Webster said a possible legislative solution would be to eliminate the 40-cent copay and expand free lunches for families at 185 percent above the federal poverty level — roughly $36,000 for a family of three.

“Parents should be held responsible, and that’s the truth,” said Webster. “But what do you tell a child that is standing before you and their parents haven’t paid? Do you tell that child that they can’t eat a hot meal today?”

Webster has been trying to draw attention to the issue for six years now.

“Nobody had been paying attention to this until those 40 kids in Utah had their lunches taken away from them,” she said.

Gov. Mark Dayton seized the opportunity after the report’s publication to say he will push for additional funding in the upcoming legislative session to “ensure that every child has access to a nutritious lunch in Minnesota schools.”

Now, Gov, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Or is there? I can think of one — the half-billion we taxpayers are footing to help build a sports stadium for a billionaire.

Maybe, as one righteous Georgia politician suggested last month, we should have these delinquent kiddies work for their hot gruel.

“Why don’t you have the kids pay a dime, pay a nickel to instill in them that there is, in fact, no such thing as a free lunch? Or maybe sweep the floor of the cafeteria?” said U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga.

I thought immediately of Oliver Twist and his empty bowl of gruel: “Please, sir, I want some more.”

It turns out Kingston might be among the kings of free lunches.

A Savannah, Ga., TV station found out Kingston and his staff “expensed nearly $4,200 in meals for business purposes to his congressional office, paid for by the American taxpayer,” WSAV 3’s Dan Kartunen reported. The amount could have bought nearly 2,000 Georgia school lunches.

WSAV also found that Kingston racked up $4,289 of free meals paid for by third-party groups. Kingston also expensed $145,391 worth of meals for campaign events. That’s a lot more cheese sandwiches.

BOY’S HAND IS STAMPED

Here’s the skinny. Yes, parents should pay. But no child should be shamed or embarrassed or humiliated at a cafeteria in such manner because their parents did not pay. No child should have their hands stamped with the words “money” or “lunch” as if they committed a cardinal sin not of their making.

We serve prisoners three hot meals a day. Yet, in some places in this state and nation, we deny a child a decent meal or toss it away to punish their parents through them.

“He was embarrassed,” said a newsroom colleague here whose 8-year-old son was denied a hot lunch and given a cold cheese sandwich, his hand stamped with what amounts to the modern-day cafeteria version of the scarlet letter.

“He showed me (the hand) and said, ‘Daddy, Daddy, you have to pay,’ ” said the colleague, who had not yet set up an online pay account and forgot to pay in person.

From smoking crack in a Harlem drug den for a front-page exposé to covering the deaths of 86 people in a Bronx social club fire, Rubén Rosario spent 11 years as a writer for the New York Daily News before joining the Pioneer Press in 1991 as special correspondent and city editor. He launched his award-winning column in 1997. He is by far the loudest writer in the newsroom over the phone.

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